Multivocality as Practice of Critical Inquiry for Social Justice

Authors

Cesar Cisneros, Universidad de TarapacaFollow

Abstract

Multivocality has been clearly and in detail present in social science reflection since the impact of the so-called linguistic turn and nowadays it has also presence in the qualitative inquiry current discussion. To explore how multivocality can be a practice of qualitative inquiry for social justice is the goal of this contribution. It is a global picture of epistemic violence that has subjugated knowledge and practices along with executing genocides and exterminations of otherness to build societies without social, epistemic, and cognitive justice that my goal is to unveil the horizon of modern social sciences to get a better understanding of the new ways of knowledge construction committed to the emancipation of those dominant hegemonic social practices that have made possible the existence of human misery and social, epistemic, and cognitive injustices. So, I will examine the concept of multivocality within social theory to bring it into play with the social justice, epistemic violence, and epistemicide contemporary discussions. Doing so will make its current position within qualitative inquiry practices more transparent. Putting rebellious, creative, poetic, performative, and subversive imaginations into play to discover another social order is what animates me now: building a world in which many worlds exist, building a world with multivoicedness and vari-voicedness inside; many voices without hierarchies or domination or extermination between them. In this paper I will try to delve into the background of our scientific and humanistic knowledge to understand our real political commitment to emancipation, freedom, and social and epistemic justice; however, I will only concentrate on what I assume are the consequences of applying Bakhtin’s concept of multivocality to qualitative research in its pursuit of social and epistemic justice.

Keywords

epistemic justice, social justice, Bakhtin, epistemicide, epistemic violence, reactionary populism

Author Bio(s)

I was Professor of Sociology at Autonomous Metropolitan University-Iztapalapa, Mexico for more than 30 years before retiring. I am currently affiliated to University of Tarapaca, Chile as associate professor. My bachelor’s degree was in Psychology, my Master’s in Rural Sociology, and my Doctorate in Political Science. I have taught Qualitative Methods and Social Sciences Epistemology for a long time. I have been a visiting professor at the International Institute for Qualitative Methodology, University of Alberta, Canada (2001-2003), in the CAQDAS Networking Project at University of Surrey, UK (2008) and Department of Philosophy and Social Sciences in the University of Augsburg, Germany (2015-2016). Nowadays I belong to Editorial Boards in journals as Qualitative Sociology Review, Qualitative Research in Psychology, Qualitative Health Research, International Review of Qualitative Research, Departures in Critical Qualitative Research, among others. And I was the responsible editor for the Spanish version of FQS (Forum Qualitative Sozialforschung / Forum: Qualitative Social Research), 2001-2016. Please direct correspondence to ccisnerosp@academicos.uta.cl.

Acknowledgements

The project was supported by UTA Mayor 3771-22 by University of Tarapacá, Chile.

Publication Date

8-6-2022

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 4.0 International License.

DOI

10.46743/2160-3715/2022.5507

Recommended APA Citation

Cisneros, C. (2022). Multivocality as Practice of Critical Inquiry for Social Justice. The Qualitative Report, 27(8), 1529-1546. https://doi.org/10.46743/2160-3715/2022.5507

ORCID ID

0000-0002-6717-756X

ResearcherID

AFT-2460-2022